Tangible Media Group

Museums collect artifacts, and libraries collect books. How about “interactive experiences”? Who can/should collect and archive “interaction design” and its UX? In his opening keynote presentation, Professor Ishii speculates on how museums and libraries of the future should preserve interactive experiences for people in the the far future of 2200.Over the past quarter century, the Tangible Media Group founded by Professor Hiroshi Ishii in 1995 at the MIT Media Lab has been designing a series of Tangible User Interfaces by coupling physical objects and digital information in order to make bits directly manipulable and perceptible. Their goal is to invent new design media for artistic expression and for scientific analysis, taking advantage of the richness of human senses and skills – as developed through our lifetime of interaction with the physical world.Tangible Media has presented their visions of “Tangible Bits” and “Radical Atoms”(https://tangible.media.mit.edu/vision/Tangible%20Bits) at a variety of academic, design, and artistic venues (including ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, Industrial Design Society of America, AIGA, Ars Electronica, ICC, Centre Pompidou, Victoria and Albert Museum, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Milan Design Week), emphasizing that the design of engaging and inspiring tangible interactions requires the rigor of both scientific and artistic review, encapsulated by Hiroshi’s motto, “Be Artistic and Analytic. Be Poetic and Pragmatic.”Tangible Media has published a large number of academic papers and research videos through ACM Digital Libraries, and disseminated through SNS (such as Facebook photo albums and Twitter) as well as on their own website. However, the experience of engaging tangible interactions through live demo and exhibition is hard to capture, replay, and share globally. This interactive experience has been demonstrated at places like the MIT Media Lab, ICC, Centre Pompidou, Ars Electronica Center, and Cooper Hewitt Design Museum.